Gold RImmed Stamped Clay Bowls

I saw this blog over on pinterest for stamped clay bowls and really loved the idea, I also needed to make something for a belated mother's day present for when I head back to the UK in the Easter hols. So I thought this would be perfect. But in my normal haphazard style, mine are of course far from the perfection of Gathering Beauty's bowls. But I still love them and think my mother will too.

WHAT YOU NEED

Air Dry Clay

A Stamp of Some Kind (mine was a clear plastic one but you can use wooden mounted rubber ones too, they can also be any size, you will just need to stamp more).

Ink

Gold Cermamic Paint

Rolling Pin

Knife

Sandpaper

Paintbrush

White Spirit

First of all I made a mount for my stamp because I did not have one of those plastic blocks big enough, and I was trying to do this on the cheap.

You can see it here inked up and ready to go.

Then get a chunk of clay, knead it then roll it out until the desired thickness.

There are two ways of going about the next bit, either you can stamp the rolled out clay, or you can cut it to shape first then stamp it. I found doing it the first way (as the other blog did), meant that I had scraps of clay with ink on it, thus making it more or less useless to use again. So I decided it was better to cut it to size first.

So put a bowl over it that is the desired size and cut around with a knife.

Voila!

Now stamp it. Remember to ink up your stamp thoroughly each time and apply equal pressure.

You will then have a stamped disk, as you can see my ain't perfect (but it is part of the charm!)

Then press it carefully into a bowl. Do this evenly and gradually to avoid distorting the pattern.

Keep going until you use all your clay and all your bowls!

You then need to leave them to dry, I did this before work and by the time I came home (7 hours later in my very warm apartment) they were ready to turn out.

If you look carefully on this one you can see the rim is whiter where it is dry and the rest is still grey. It is not quite ready to be turned out.

This is how they looked when I left them to dry over night.

Once totally dry (about 24hours later) I gave them all a good sanding and evened out the rims as much as I felt like.

See, Much neater.

I then painted all their rims gold.

Some of them however had traces of blue ink on the bottom so I thought I would paint some of the bottoms gold too. Also as I am giving them as presents in sets of two, I thought this would make it more exciting!

Two coats later and I am done.

I am quite happy with how they turned out and will deff do this again. It was good fun and fairly cheap. And I think they look beautiful!

Next time I would like to get another stamp and colour to mix it up a bit. I nearly went with another colour because this is the same as the colour Gathering Beauty used, but its also the colour of my current bed and future bedroom AND my other choices of red or purple would not have been as appreciated by the intended recipients. Choosing another colour purely to be different seemed more daft than using the same! But if it had been just for me I would have done red for sure. 

Here is a pretty song

Photo Transfer Experiment on Glass Bottles

I went back to the UK over the New Year and spent most of that time staying with a friend who is quite frankly a bottle fanatic- I daren't count how many bottles are lingering in his house. Much more fascinating than the ones used here, in fact I wish I could share with you guys photos of his place- it's kinda amazing! We spent most the time climbing up things, into things... and DIGGING. And that is where I found these glass bottles.

We actually dug up a lot of other things, mostly bottles but also bits of pottery, a few animals bones (and teeth), and some old pipes. My friend said the clear bottles were worthless and no point keeping them, but I remembered a tutorial I had seen about photo transfer and thought I would have a go...

I have a bit of a thing for animal skulls so I had to keep hold of him! (I was strongly discouraged from keeping the teeth I found or the  horn... If we were in France I would have but I was not sure what would happen on the eurostar if I had teeth in my luggage!)

So I went out and bought some modge podge and when I finally got home I got cracking.

Here are my bottles, in various conditions. They did get a good clean but I left some of the marks on there because I like how beaten they look.

Then I grabbed some INKJET prints of some of my photos, they must be INKJET, REVERSED and printed onto NORMAL paper, and cut out sections for my bottles.

From left to right: an abandoned hospital in France, a section of la petite ceinture (abandoned railway), factory floor in the Midlands (UK), more of petite ceinture and more of the first hospital. All the bottles were found in the dumping ground of an asylum. 

Cover the surface of the bottle with modge podge.

Then put your photo face down on the bottle (this was fiddly for the small or more rounded ones).

This is what it looked like flipped over, but I wasn't done... Leave it to dry THOROUGHLY before continuing.

Saturate the top layer with water then start gradually rubbing away at the paper.

The first layer will come off in rolls.

Leaving it like this.

Next you must patiently rub away the rest, every now and then adding water with a cloth. Sometimes it helps to let it dry before going back to it. This is my third attempt and honestly patience is the key, I got a bit over eager a few times and did too much in one go and the image just got over eroded or stayed too white. I had three on the go so just went back and forth between them. No kidding this took a while. 

It can also help to purposefully rough up the edges so they aren't so clean.

Once you are satisfied with the result- and make sure it fully dries so you can see how many layers you have gone through, some of my bottles took three of four attempts to get right cover the image with a layer of modge podge.

Leave to dry.

Hold up to the light.

They look so much more stunning in the light then not. I wish I had a windowsill... I hope my next place has one!

As you can see I have not finished all my bottles, some others are still drying as this was a first attempt on anything 3D I didn't want to ruin all my bottles in one go.

I think I might have to open a new etsy store!

UPDATE: I decided to put them on my Etsy store, take a peek here.